Last week as part of the launch of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, the team behind the photo and video sharing service Photobucket released their free Windows 8 app on the Windows Store. The app lets users search through the nearly 10 billion photos that have been uploaded on Photobucket.com, among other features.

Today at ArsTechnica.com, the team behind the Windows 8 app discussed working with Microsoft's latest operating system. The app itself used some of the code developed for the Windows Phone Photobucket app. Visual Studio 11 was the main tool in creating the Windows 8 version, using C# and XAML.

Luke Swanson, the vice-president of engineering at Photobucket, said he would like to be able to reuse more of an app's development code that could allow it to work across a number of Microsoft's products. He states:

One thing that would be nice is the convergence of Windows Phone, the Metro interface, and even down the line the Xbox and other platforms. Having the ability to have more code reuse, especially on the UI side, across those platforms is something that would be extremely powerful for Microsoft.

In terms of the current Photobucket app available for Windows 8 Consumer Preview users, Swanson calls the app a "phase one beta." The team plans to add additional features for future versions including being able to upload and play back video clips. The team also wants to put in more of Windows 8's Metro capabilities such as semantic zoom. Swanson says, "We feel like the application we have out there is a great starting point and a great beta to get feedback from users."